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Zero Waste, Recycling and Climate Change
Bill Sheehan, Ph.D.
GrassRoots Recycling Network
October, 2000
High levels of energy and materials consumption in industrial countries
are the driving force behind the decline in virtually all major life
support systems on Planet Earth. Over the last decade an increasing number
of scientists and other thoughtful people have come to conclude that
modern levels of materials and energy consumption are having a
destabilizing influence on the world's atmosphere.
Energy
consumption contributes directly to climate change by adding carbon-based
molecules to the atmosphere in excess of naturally occurring amounts.
Carbon molecules, primarily carbon dioxide from burning petroleum
products, trap radiant heat and keep it from escaping from the Earth's
atmosphere. The resulting warming of the air is changing our global
climate.
Materials consumption contributes indirectly to climate
change because it requires energy to mine, extract, harvest, process, and
transport raw materials, and more energy to manufacture, transport and,
after use, dispose of products.
The United States consumed 30
percent of the materials produced globally in 1995, while it accounted for
less than 5 percent of the world's population.[1] Of all the materials used
in products, only 1 percent is used in products 'durable' enough to still
be in use six months later, according to industrial ecologist Robert
Ayres. This wasteful consumption of materials wreaks havoc on our land and
water resources. What’s seldom appreciated is that it also wreaks havoc on
our atmosphere and contributes to climate change. Waste prevention and
recycling are critical to stopping climate change.
A growing
international Zero
Waste Movement is calling for radical
resource efficiency and eliminating rather than managing waste –
strategies that have major benefits for slowing climate change. There are
zero emission cars and zero accident worksites; Zero Waste is a goal for
how we should responsibly manage materials and the energy required to make
them. Zero Waste is a 'whole system' approach to resource management that
maximizes recycling, minimizes waste, reduces consumption and ensures that
products are made to be reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or
the marketplace. As Jeffrey Hollender, President of Seventh Generation
puts it, "Zero Waste is the mother of environmental no-brainers."[2] For suggestions on how to
get involved with the Zero Waste movement, read the section below,
Take Action
Zero Waste
systems – including waste prevention and recycling -- reduce greenhouse
gases by:
- Saving energy – especially by reducing energy consumption associated
with extracting, processing and transporting ‘virgin’ raw materials
manufacturing with recycled materials uses less energy overall compared
with manufacturing using virgin materials;
- Increasing carbon uptake by forests (recycled paper, for example,
leaves more trees standing so they can breathe in our carbon dioxide);
and
- Reducing and eventually eliminating the need for landfills (which
release methane) and incinerators (which waste energy relative to
recycling and reuse).
1. Recycling, Waste Prevention and Product Redesign Save Energy
Wasting materials causes massive amounts of energy to be used to
extract and manufacture natural resource replacement materials. Reducing
material use through waste prevention and increasing material
efficiency through product redesign have the greatest beneficial
impact on climate change. Recycling adds further to greenhouse gas
savings by reducing the need for energy-intensive resource
extraction.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that
by cutting the amount of waste we generate back to 1990 levels, we
could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 11.6 million metric tons of
carbon equivalent (MTCE), the basic unit of measure for greenhouse gases.
Increasing our national recycling rate from its current level of 28
percent to 35 percent would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 9.8 million
MTCE, compared to landfilling the same material. Together, these levels of
waste prevention and recycling would slash emissions by more than 21.4
million MTCE – an amount equal to the average annual emissions from the
electricity consumption of roughly 11 million households. [3]
Manufacturing using
recycled rather than virgin material saves substantial energy in virtually
every case.[4]
- Net carbon emissions are four to five times lower when materials are
produced from recycled steel, copper, glass, and paper. They are 40
times lower for aluminum.[5]
- Making a ton of aluminum cans from its virgin source, bauxite, uses
229 British thermal units (Btus). In contrast, producing cans from
recycled aluminum uses only 8 Btus per ton, an energy savings of
96%.[6] Despite this, 45 billion
aluminum beer and soft drink cans were wasted in the U.S. in
1998.[7]
- Likewise, extracting and processing petroleum into common plastic
containers (No. 1 ‘PET’ and No. 2 ‘HDPE’) takes four to eight times more
energy than making plastics from recycled plastics. Yet the recycling
rate for these plastic containers was only 20.2% in 1998.[8]
Of course, energy conservation is just one of the environmental
benefits attained by eliminating waste, increasing material efficiency and
manufacturing products from recycled rather than virgin materials. As
noted by Jeffrey Morris, virgin materials extraction (including drilling,
digging, cutting, refining, smelting, and pulping) also: "(1) releases
chemical substances, carbon dioxide, waste heat and processing refuse into
air and water and onto land; (2) impairs the health of people exposed to
polluting chemical releases; (3) dislocates and destroys habitat for a
wide variety of non-human creatures and organisms; (4) diminishes
productivity in natural resource industries that depend on healthy species
and ecosystems; (5) impairs ecological functions and biological diversity
in ecosystems; and (6) alters the sights, sounds, smells and feelings
humans enjoyed in many previously pristine, natural places."[9] Such consequences create an
important difference between recycled material– and virgin material–based
systems that is not adequately captured by life-cycle inventories.
2. Recycling, Reducing Paper and Wood Use Save Forests that
Suck Up Carbon from the Atmosphere top
Recycling a ton of paper
saves about 24 trees, which absorb 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the
air each year, reducing the global greenhouse effect.[9a] Trees take carbon from the
atmosphere and store it in their tissues for long periods.
In the
United States, the amount of forest land (33 percent of total land surface
area) has remained fairly constant during the last several decades.
Intensive tree farming practices and regeneration of previously cleared
forest areas (particularly in the East) have offset tree harvesting and
urban sprawl into forested area, resulting in an annual net uptake (i.e.,
sequestration) of carbon.[10]
While
the net increase in tree biomass in the United States is good news for
climate change, it is not necessarily good news for biodiversity or other
aspects of environmental quality. That’s because the dominant trend in
forestry today is harvesting by clear-cutting and conversion of
ecologically complex forests to single-species, single-aged tree farms.
E.O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist and Pulitzer Prize winner, estimates that
a pine plantation contains 90 to 95 percent fewer species than the forest
that preceded it. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that pine plantations
now make up 36 percent of all pine stands in the South and within 20 years
will make up 70 percent.[11]
More
importantly, waste prevention and recycling reduce greenhouse gases by
saving trees that take up carbon dioxide. Protecting and restoring diverse
forests requires addressing the staggering waste of forest products.
Consider:
- The U.S. sends more paper to landfills and incinerators than all of
China even uses, despite its being the world's second largest
consumer.[12]
- While the timber industry touts advances in paper recycling,
unsustainable paper wasting rates are seldom mentioned: 58.3% of all
paper and paperboard is dumped in the landfill or burned in
incinerators.[13]
- Paper and wood account for almost half of all waste that goes to
landfills and incinerators. Forest products (paper and wood) constitute
38.3% by weight of ‘municipal solid waste’ and 51.9 percent by weight of
all products (i.e., excluding food scraps and yard trimmings) sent to
municipal waste facilities.[14]
- Wasted paper alone constitutes 48 percent of the greenhouse gases
emitted during the production of products that wind up in a ton of
'municipal waste' sent to landfill, and 64 percent of commonly diverted
waste.[15]
3. Reducing Landfilling and Incineration cuts Methane, Saves Energy
top
Landfills and
incinerators contribute to global climate change by destroying resources,
causing more new resources to extracted (see Section 1 above). We mixed
156 million tons of used products and packaging together in 1997, called
it trash, and buried or burned it. Then we extracted from the environment
billions of tons of virgin materials to make new products and packaging to
replace those we wasted.
We should not just look at weight
diverted as a measure of system performance, but rather prioritize
recovering for reuse and recycling the materials that otherwise would
waste so much if they had to be replaced by products made from scratch
from natural resources. For example, some complain, "Why all the talk
about soft drink containers when they are only 2 per cent of the waste
stream?" Well, aluminum cans only comprise 1.4 percent of the entire waste
stream by weight, but they contribute ten times as much -- 14 percent --
of the emissions embodied in a ton of divertible waste sent to
landfill.[16] Likewise, as the graph
above shows, plastic containers take large amounts of energy to
manufacture.
Landfills and Methane Landfills are the top
human-caused source of methane: 36 percent of human caused methane
releases come from our municipal solid waste landfills, according to the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.[17] Organic materials (derived
from living organisms) produce methane in landfills when they decompose
without oxygen, under tons of garbage. Methane gas is a potent greenhouse
gas, 21 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than
carbon dioxide. A ton of municipal solid waste landfilled produces 123
pounds of methane. [18]
Some
landfills operators try to recover methane. This is a voluntary effort at
all but the largest landfills. According to one expert, "60% is about the
best recovery of methane being reported, and most landfills that collect
methane recover somewhere around 40%." In 1996, only 14 percent of
landfill methane was captured (most landfill methane is flared on site,
some is used to produce energy). [19]
Landfills vs.
Composting Current ‘state of the art’ landfill design aims to entomb
garbage and keep it dry forever. Many engineers, and even U.S. EPA,
acknowledge that this is impossible, that all landfills will eventually
leak and pollute groundwater. Recently, new systems are being developed,
called ‘bioreactors,’ to try to capture methane more effectively. By
recirculating leachate (garbage juice) and adding water, decomposition
rates can be increased, making methane recovery more economical. This also
compacts garbage, further increasing the value of remaining landfill
space.
From the limited perspective of managing waste, this may
seem reasonable. But from a Zero Waste perspective of managing resources,
bioreactors make little sense. Over 62 percent of what gets buried in
municipal landfills is readily recyclable or compostable organics,
including paper, wood, yard trimmings and food scraps.[20] Organic material is needed
to replenish our depleted, eroding and artificially-fertilized
soils.
Yet when paper, wood, yard trimmings and food scraps are
mixed with the myriad toxic products in household and industrial waste,
they become too contaminated to apply to soils. The rational solution is
to separate clean organics at the source and compost them into soil
amendments.
When done properly, both centralized and backyard
composting generally result in no net greenhouse emissions, according to
U.S. EPA. Somewhat like trees, application of yard trimmings compost to
degraded agricultural land results in carbon storage (more so at low rates
than at high rates).[21]
Incineration vs. Recycling One might think that
burning garbage for energy production would ameliorate global climate
change by reducing the need to burn other fuels. There are two serious
problems with this notion.
First, any gains in energy are
outweighed by the production of toxic emissions and toxic ash, even in
'state-of-the-art' incinerators. Incinerator emissions of acid gases,
mercury, dioxins and furans have led to widespread protests in North
America, Japan and continental Europe, forcing the closure of plants and
the abandonment of plans for new ones. In the U.S., 248 new municipal
incinerators have been blocked and the number still in operation has
fallen from 170 in 1991 to 119 in 1998. In 1997, 17 percent of U.S.
municipal discards was burned (in a relatively few states), 55 percent was
landfilled and 28 percent was recycled.
Second, the energy produced
by burning garbage is only a quarter of the energy saved by recycling.
Recycling used resources has energy impacts, but they are much less than
burning those materials. Richard Denison of Environmental Defense examined
detailed life-cycle studies and concluded:[22]
- When all activities entailing energy use are tallied, MSW [municipal
solid waste] incineration results in only 28% of the net reduction in
energy use realized through residential MSW recycling.
- Within the waste management system itself, recycling uses somewhat
more energy than the other options; system-wide, however, recycling uses
the least energy by a large margin.
- From a system-wide view, recycled production plus recycling
collection uses the least energy, considerably less than virgin
production plus incineration … This difference is due to the substantial
reduction in energy use associated with manufacturing processes that use
recycled materials relative to those that use virgin materials.
- Transportation energy required to ship processed recyclable
materials to market (i.e. points of remanufacture) is quite modest,
amounting to at most a few percent of manufacturing energy.
Take Action: Getting to Zero
Implementation of Zero Waste resource management systems is arguably
one of the most important steps to the sustainability of the earth’s
atmosphere and ecosystems. Zero Waste confronts the whole idea of endless
consumption without needing to say so, by enabling even those who are
locked into the system to challenge their own behavior in a positive way
without immediately threatening it.
The GrassRoots Recycling
Network (GRRN) has been spearheading the North American arm of a growing
international movement that promotes Zero Waste as essential to reversing
current unsustainable resource practices and policies. GRRN is building
effective coalitions and partnerships for Zero Waste policies based on
government, corporate and individual accountability for waste.
GRRN has identified the following outcomes as essential to move us
towards a Zero Waste society: (a) Extended Producer Responsibility for
Waste; (b) Consumer Action Against Wasteful Corporations; (c) Deposit
Programs; (d) Jobs Through Reuse and Recycling; (e) Incentives for
Reducing Trash; (f) Full-Cost Accounting and Life-Cycle Analysis; (g)
Minimum Recycled Content; (h) Ending Subsidies for Extracting Virgin
Resources; (i) Shifting Taxes from ‘Goods’ to ‘Bads’; (j) National
Resource Policy; and (k) Campaign Finance Reform.
Recognizing that
the implementation of Zero Waste is a long-term, ambitious goal, a key
component to our outreach is to educate other organizations whose
work/mission might not be readily identifiable as impacted by Zero Waste.
Practical strategies and actions can be taken by all sectors of society in
all institutions. GRRN invites all interested parties to join GRRN’s
campaigns and share your experiences on our listserve, GreenYes.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Arthur Boone for EPA Region 9 and
Susan Kinsella of Conservatree for reading commenting on an earlier
draft..
Resources
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Climate Change and Waste website
Ozone Action
Center for Environmental Citizenship - Climate Change News
Climate
Ark - dedicated to promoting public
policy that addresses global climate change through reductions in carbon
and other emissions, energy conservation, alternative energy sources and
ending deforestation.
Forests.org -
forest conservation archives & portal.
Climate Change and Solid Waste Management National Association of Counties
U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Management of Selected Materials in
Municipal Solid Waste, September 1998
[EPA530-R-98-013]
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks:
1990 – 1997, April 1999 [EPA
236-R-99-003].
GrassRoots Recycling Network, Wasting and
Recycling in the United States 2000,
researched by Institute for Local Self-Reliance, March 2000.
Richard
A. Denison, "Environmental Life-Cycle Comparisons of Recycling, Landfilling and
Incineration," Annual Review of Energy
and Environment, 1996.
Ted Williams, "False Forests,"
Mother Jones, May/June 2000.
Endnotes
[1] John Young, "The coming materials efficiency revolution," in B.K.
fishbein, J.R. Ehrenfeld and J.E. Young, Extended Producer Responsibility:
A Materials Policy for the 21st Century, INFORM,
Inc
[2] Jeffrey Hollender,
"Getting Wasted...A Fresh Look At The State Of The Art
Of Recycling," Non-Toxic Times, Vol.
1, No. 9 (June 2000)
[3] EPA Climate Change Website, browsed August 25, 2000
[4] Jeffrey Morris, "Recycling vs. Incineration: An
Energy Conservation Analysis," Journal of Hazardous Materials 47 (1996),
pp 277-293. (also in 3 issues of the Monthly UnEconomist)
[5] Same as
Endnote 3.
[6] GrassRoots Recycling Network, Wasting and
Recycling in the United States 2000,
researched by Intstitute for Local Self-Reliance, March 2000, page
24
[7] Container Recycling Institute
[8] Same as Endnote 7.
[9] Jeffrey Morris,
"A Tale of Two Realities," The Monthly UnEconomist, June 1999. (free download)
[9a] Susan
Kinsella, personal communication.
[10] U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks:
1990 – 1997, April 1999 [EPA
236-R-99-003] "Globally, the most important human activity that affects
forest carbon fluxes is deforestation, particularly the clearing of
tropical forests for agricultural use. Tropical deforestation is estimated
to have released about 23 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions from
anthropogenic sources during the 1980s." In the United States,"The net
carbon sequestration reported for 1997 represents an offset of about 14
percent of the 1997 carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel
combustion."
[11] Ted Williams, "False Forests,"
Mother Jones, May/June 2000
[12] Janet Abramovitz, "Paper Cuts:
Recovering the Paper Landscape," Worldwatch Report, 1999.
[13] U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, Characterization of Municipal Solid Waste in the United
States:1998 Update
[14] Same as
Endnote 13.
[15] Usman Valiante, "Energy to Waste?" Solid Waste &
Recycling, April/May 2000, pages 8-11.
[16] Same as Endnote 15.
[17]
Same as Endnote 10.
[18] Same as Endnote 10.
[19] Same as Endnote
10.
[20] Same as Endnote 13, pages 31 and 144. Total organic fraction
of what we waste in MSW landfills is 85.6%; that includes materials that
could be designed to be compostable: plastic, leather and
textiles.
[21] Same as Endnote 10.
[22] Richard A. Denison,
"Environmental Life-Cycle Comparisons of Recycling,
Landfilling and Incineration," Annual
Review of Energy and Environment,
1996.
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